Did you see the closing window? Did you hear the slamming door?

[sovay]

The sonic boom heard across Massachusetts earlier this afternoon has been deemed the explosion of a bolide meteor east of Boston. Which is much more awesome than many other reasons for booms over New England and I can hope that not all the fragments fell into the sea. None of them appear to be in our back yard despite the air-concussing noise freaking out Hestia. Our neighborhood suffers so many flash-bangs to the cochlea, I mistook it for a byproduct of construction—I had earplugs in—rather than the cosmos coming home.

Comments

[asakiyume]

SO JEALOUS. It was not audible out here :-| (very very cool!)

[sovay]

SO JEALOUS. It was not audible out here :-| (very very cool!)

May you have a meteor of your own! Per CBS, there have been multiple fireballs this season.

[gullyfoyle]

Interesting article here: https://amsmeteors.org/ams-q1-2026-fireball-analysis.html

"Has Something Changed in the Near-Earth Meteoroid Environment?" is a pretty eye-catching and evocative title. I've read it twice and still don't have a good grip on exactly what it's trying to say. Apparently there are more reports of, specifically, bigger fireballs, and maybe it's an actual physical phenomenon or maybe it's just more reports because people are asking their phones "what the fuck was that?" and are being advised by Gemini and Copilot to report what they saw to the American Meteor Society. Nevertheless, add another big one to the list.

[sovay]

"Has Something Changed in the Near-Earth Meteoroid Environment?" is a pretty eye-catching and evocative title.

Thank you for this! I pointed to the CBS article because I had already linked it, but the American Meteor Society has a lot more detail (and statistics). Your read on it looks right to me.

"What this is, is a measurable change in the AMS fireball data that we do not yet fully understand. After years of stable baseline activity, something appears to have shifted in Q1 2026, and the signal is consistent across multiple metrics: witness counts, sonic boom rates, long-duration sighting volume, and the distribution of event sizes. Whether this reflects a genuine change in the near-Earth meteoroid environment, an amplification of reporting through AI and social media, or some combination of both—we cannot yet say definitively. What we can say is that the question deserves both public awareness and scientific attention."

(I also wondered if more satellites were falling out of low Earth orbit because it's so cluttered up there, but understand that the question cannot be answered without more instrumental data and recovered specimens.)